Book Description

Richard Wagner, supreme German artistic genius of the late nineteenth century, was greatly influenced by circumstances and people. He was a man of tremendous energy, creative as well as outward energy. In his early years he was active in the practical routine of the theatre, and in the political happenings of Germany. These activities has a strong influence on his writing, his life and his philosophies. But through it all he never doubted his own ability to solve any problem whether it be in art, science, economics, politics, or the running of a kingdom, or that he could write better music than any of his contemporaries. Always he was confronted by the perilous state of his finances. This it was that drove him to new and varied problems. In some strange way the "Hoard" in "The Ring" became symbolical of the factors in modern society to which he attributed most of his own troubles. Wagner's need of symphathy, understanding, and financial aid was fulfilled by many people, especially women. The myth of "The Ring" embodied for him his own situations as the victim of a hostile, corrupt world, betrayed by a woman, and the tragedy of the world that destroyed him. In each of the characters he sees some phase of his own life. In "Tristan", he wrote about the conflict of his life, the conflict between the compulsion of desire and that of morality. In the philosophy of Schopenhauer he found the meaning of his work and his life. It made his art not just the means of expression but a refuge from unalterable reality. In later life this did not satisfy him. So he wrote "The Mastersingers" not to express the tragic fundamentals of human nature but to celebrate art as a supreme social value and himself as its supreme exponent. In "The Rhinegold", "The Valkyrie" and the first two acts of "Siegfried", Wagner depicted the tragic workings of the curse of desire and a vision of the liberating, splendid innocence of nature, for which mankind, represented by Wotan, yearned. Siegfried was the child of that yearning. But Siegfried became Tristan. The child of nature became tainted with a passion so fierce that he craved his doom, craved the release of death. The Siegfried of the third act was eleven years older than that child of nature. Wagner made him into the hero of a culminating tragedy: Siegfried, the guileless, radiant liberator. In his old age, Wagner turned from tragedy to religion. In "The Dusk of the Gods", he had expressed the tragedy of a humanity for which there was not salvation. Now to reveal man's tragic knowledge of his downfall, the sublimation of his sinful lusts into selfless pity for his fellows, his yearning for redemption and profound truth, he created "Parsifal". In his old age, Wagner could not endure Siegfried's tragedy. Painfully he renounced the joys of earthly fulfilment and longed for redemption in another world.